The primary molecular influences of marine plastisphere formation and function: Novel insights into organism -organism and -co-pollutant interactions

Lee, Charlotte E.; Messer, Lauren F.; Holland, Sophie I.; Gutiérrez, Tony; Matallana-Surget, Sabine

doi:10.1080/10643389.2023.2224182

Cited by 9 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 145 publications

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“…This is because these types of chemical pollutants have high binding ( K d ) coefficients 10 which renders them with a high capacity to adsorb to hydrophobic plastic polymers (the most common plastics produced commercially), often via hydrophobic or π–π interaction mechanisms 11 , 12 . For example, phenanthrene has been reported on plastics at concentrations reaching 16.4 mg/kg, whereas phthalates and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have been reported at concentrations of up to 84.6 mg/kg and 18.6 mg/kg, respectively 13 . These types of co-pollutants can in turn influence the microbial colonisation and development of biofilms on the plastic surface—the zone defined as the ‘plastisphere’ 14 .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Identification of the bacterial community that degrades phenanthrene sorbed to polystyrene nanoplastics using DNA-based stable isotope probing

Summers,

Bin-Hudari,

Magill

et al. 2024

Sci Rep

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In the Anthropocene, plastic pollution has become a new environmental biotope, the so-called plastisphere. In the oceans, nano- and micro-sized plastics are omnipresent and found in huge quantities throughout the water column and sediment, and their large surface area-to-volume ratio offers an excellent surface to which hydrophobic chemical pollutants (e.g. petrochemicals and POPs) can readily sorb to. Our understanding of the microbial communities that breakdown plastic-sorbed chemical pollutants, however, remains poor. Here, we investigated the formation of 500 nm and 1000 nm polystyrene (PS) agglomerations in natural seawater from a coastal environment, and we applied DNA-based stable isotope probing (DNA-SIP) with the 500 nm PS sorbed with isotopically-labelled phenanthrene to identify the bacterial members in the seawater community capable of degrading the hydrocarbon. Whilst we observed no significant impact of nanoplastic size on the microbial communities associated with agglomerates that formed in these experiments, these communities were, however, significantly different to those in the surrounding seawater. By DNA-SIP, we identified Arcobacteraceae, Brevundimonas, Comamonas, uncultured Comamonadaceae, Delftia, Sphingomonas and Staphylococcus, as well as the first member of the genera Acidiphilum and Pelomonas to degrade phenanthrene, and of the genera Aquabacterium, Paracoccus and Polymorphobacter to degrade a hydrocarbon. This work provides new information that feeds into our growing understanding on the fate of co-pollutants associated with nano- and microplastics in the ocean.

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